Motivational Quotes

Books - reading

Books are masters who instruct us without rods or ferules, without words or anger, without bread or money. If you approach them, they are not asleep; if you seek them, they do not hide; if you blunder, they do not scold; if you are ignorant, they do not laugh at you.

- Bury, Richard De

Best Quotes about Books - reading

After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.

Lawrence, D. H.

Bury, Richard De

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

Wolfe, Thomas

It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and to recall them with satisfaction when we are old.

Hunt, Leigh

When a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and manly thoughts, seek for no other test of its excellence. It is good, and made by a good workman.

Bruyere, Jean De La

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.

Wilde, Oscar

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

Pascal, Blaise

I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.

Phelps, William Lyon

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

10.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Ruskin, John

11.

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

Sandwell, B. K.

12.

The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

13.

Five daily newspapers arrive in my California driveway. The New York times and the Wall Street Journal are supplemented by three local papers. As for magazines, I read, or at least skim, Business Week, Forbes, The Economist, INC; Industry Week, Fortune. Other subscriptions include Sales and Marketing Management, Modern Health Care, Progressive Grocer, High Tech Business, and Slaon Management Review from MIT. I religiously read Business Tokyo, Asia Week, and Far Eastern Economic Review. I glance at Newsweek and Time ... but I devour the New Republic, Policy Review, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Monthly, and Public Interest. How about books? A dozen or more each month.

Peters, Thomas J.

14.

To read too many books is harmful.

Zedong, Mao

15.

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a certain potency of life in them, to be as active as the soul whose progeny they are; they preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of the living intellect that bred them.

Milton, John

16.

With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.

Pound, Ezra

17.

Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.

Channing, William Ellery

18.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Lee, Harper

19.

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

Gissing, George Robert

20.

She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.

Rhys, Jean

21.

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

Morely, John

22.

Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading.

Choate, Rufus

23.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

France, Anatole

24.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

Berger, John

25.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.

Disney, Walt

26.

The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

Mansfield, Katherine

27.

One sheds one's sicknesses in books -- repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.

Lawrence, D. H.

28.

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.

Whitman, Walt

29.

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine -- everybody drinks water.

Twain, Mark

30.

You are wise, witty and wonderful, but you spend too much time reading this sort of stuff.

Critchfield, Jim

31.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

Shaw, George Bernard

32.

There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

Mencken, H. L.

33.

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with all the finest men of past centuries.

Descartes, Rene

34.

The Brahmins say that in their books there are many predictions of times in which it will rain. But press those books as strongly as you can, you can not get out of them a drop of water. So you can not get out of all the books that contain the best precepts the smallest good deed.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

35.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Fuller, Thomas

36.

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

37.

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.

38.

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

Swartz, J.

39.

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

Forster, Edward M.

40.

The best effect of any book, is that it excites the reader to self-activity.

Carlyle, Thomas

41.

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet -- if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.

Miller, Henry

42.

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.

Milton, John

43.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

Chandler, Raymond

44.

The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

Byron, Lord

45.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

Belloc, Hilaire

46.

My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.

Gibbon, Edward

47.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Fusselman, W.

48.

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

Fielding, Henry

49.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

Whipple, Edwin P.

50.

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

Brookner, Anita